Over the years, SEO firms used SEO tools and direct page submissions to get links. These methods will not work today. Google can penalize you for using these techniques today.
These days, most SEO specialists know the advanced SEO techniques to build links properly. But performing an analysis of these activities in Google Search is a new area to explore. To keep at the top of the SEO link building world, you have to know how to deal with Google advanced search operators.
What Are Search Operators?
Search operators let you clear the extraneous from a search and make it work better.
Our infographic below provides a simple visual example of search operators that is easy to understand. Some of the most important search operators are described below that will help you.
How Do You Find Links to Your Website?
Do you ever wonder who is linking to the pages on your site? It is not hard. Finding the links that Google indexes is simple.
You just need to type “link:” then the name of your site. Google search results will show the pages that are linked to your URL.
For instance, if your site is seooptimizers.com, you only need to type “link:seooptimizeers.com” – with no space and no quotes – but if you check it this way, you will not see a lot of links. Why?
Google has restrictions in place that prevent all the links from showing publicly. But there is a more effective approach.
To get all the links, you should type: “Link:seooptimizers.com – seooptimizers.com. This will show you all the links to your site that are indexed in the search engine.
How to Find Your Web Pages That Google Indexes
This is a critical source of information. To find the pages on your site, just type: “Site:yourwebsite.com” and all the pages that the search engine has indexed on your site will show up.
How to Guide Google To Produce What You Want
It can be annoying if Google does not provide the search results you want. But there are ways around it.
Using quotes in your search will provide the results you want. For example, if you want to do some guest blogging, you just need to type “guest blogging” in quotes. You could be amazed at the number of exact matches that Google produces.
Explore Your Cache to See How Google Sees Your Site
Using “info” might be the best way to collect information about several components about your site at once. Type “info:yourwebsite.com” will provide key information, such as pages that link to your site, which version is cached, related pages and various details about your domain.
What we have mentioned so far are a few of the search operators that you can tap. But there are more advanced search operators that can yield more results.
In the infographic below, you can see some of the most important operators. Explore each one so you get to know them better.
More About How to Use Google Search Operators
If you use Google every day and are unfamiliar with search operators, you are missing some critical information. These operators allow you to search faster. You can get more details without having to search several times. Below is more information you might find interesting.
How to Get Google To Search a Word
Before you learn more about Google search operators, let’s cover the basics of searching in Google. When you open your browser, you can type the word you want to search in the address bar. Then press enter.
How to Do a Specific Google Search
You can click the three dots that are vertical on the top right of the page if you are looking for a word within a specific page. After you click the three vertical dots, click find. You will see a bar on the top right portion of the screen.
You can type the word there and find what you are looking for in highlights. Also, you can press CTRL+F to make this go faster.
If you are looking for a word that you found on a page, you can highlight the word with your mouse and press right click to search.
If you are on a smartphone, you can do a search on a particular page by tapping that word to highlight it. A panel will appear under the webpage. You should tap it to see your results.
Also, if you want to locate specific results for the word that you are looking for on Google, it is important to use Google search operators.
What Are Search Operators?
No matter what you are looking for on Google, search operators will speed your research.
There are many special commands you can use that tells the search engine what you want to see in the results. It is not necessary to memorize them because most people can remember them.
Search operators are helpful for SEO professionals and researchers. But it appears that Google is dropping some of the more useful ones. Still, it is important to know the major search operators that are still available. It also helps to know the ones that no longer work.
Basic Google Search Operators
Right now, there are three search operators that Google always has:
- And
- Or
- ~
Google’s default is the search operator AND between your search terms. Google will usually ignore AND and OR because these are the default settings.
Also note that Google ignores single digits, articles, and other clutter words.
How to Search Without a Word
Google is not alive, but it sure seems like it is smart enough to tell us almost anything. It does not always understand the specific results you want. So, once you start searching for a word, such as ‘divergent,’ it will give you all results that are related to that term – no matter if it about the film or the word definition.
To tell Google that you do not want it to give you certain results, you can use the “ – “ operator. For instance, if you want to search for the definition of ‘divergent,’ but do not want results about the film, you would type: Divergent -movie-. This would get rid of any search results about the movie.
Using Google search operators is quite easy and fun, and will help you get more of the results you want – and faster.
